Bookmarks 03/16/2012

when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges

To address this apparent paradox—and to explore what social values, imaginaries, and desires Kristof embodies—I will introduce the concept of the open secret, arguing that elite American discourse is increasingly defined not by ideological obfuscation (where there are secrets that we just do not know), but by an insidious mélange where secrets still exist but also often seem somewhat open, recognized through the side of the eye, becoming things we must know but cannot acknowledge.

his reporting allows us to process the trauma of a world of contradictions and incoherencies while concurrently collectively agreeing on an official and comforting narrative: that of progress through the diligent application of universal liberal values. Against Kristof’s double move—opening up the caesura, allowing the pressure to escape, closing it again—the project must become to begin thinking through ways of speaking our open secrets, of holding that caesura open and doing politics in the gap.

By playing on his audience’s Orientalist, classist, and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places.

Kristof accomplishes this by using a standard and replicated formula: some mixture of (1) a construction of a bestial and demonic Other creating a spectacle of violence; (2) a rendering of the object of that horror—a depoliticized, abject victim, usually no more than a body; (3) a presentation of a (potential) salvific savior figure(typically the West writ large or a Western agent—some teleological process immanent in capitalism or development, the reader himself (who can act by donating money), and almost always Kristof himself as well); and (4) an introduction of potential linkages with larger systems and structures … only to immediately reterritorialize around the non-political solutions and the savior implementing them.

Besides introducing the Other and the victim, this section has an important additional effect: It serves as a way of silencing. Against the suggestion that Kristof should gloss the details of the horror to get to the point of the story, it becomes clear that those details are the point. As a result, the horror is too great to be responded to politically; politics is callous, insensitive, inadequate, somehow just not enough against this evil. The effect of this technique is to leave the reader stunned, numbed, and disarmed, waiting for something to make this horror go away.

Enter the third part of the triptych: the witness who plays the messianic role, both for Generose and the reader. Shannon, leading a normal life in the U.S., heard about Generose’s story in a normal way (by watching Oprah), yet she makes the extraordinary and laudable decision to go live in the DRC. Consequently she becomes the true subject of the rest of Kristof’s column, not only the redeemer for the boy and the body left behind as residual but a surrogate for the reader as well.

a larger point: In Kristof, the victim is wholly constructed and constituted by violence, or more specifically, violence that can be turned into narrative. She (and it’s usually a she) literally doesn’t exist until violence is done to her body and Kristof reports on it; she ceases to exist when violence is cleansed away through the savior’s ritual act. The victim does not continue on and face ordinary problems such as impoverishment or limited access to health care. She has served her purpose, and Kristof is off to report on the next mass rape. So he can use her name and photograph—she doesn’t exist afterward anyway.

ever momentarily, there is a mention of broader linkages—but only so they can be dismissed. We hear vaguely about the “irresponsible” international community, another state (Rwanda), big business, a global institution (the ICC), but what are the connections between these actors? How do they lead to the violence done to Generose? We don’t know, and Kristof does not encourage us to ask. Indeed, if Kristof believed that the challenges of the postcolonial state—the patterns of extraction that preempt industrialization and economic structural transformation, the destructive geopolitical machinations by states ostensibly defending human rights—were really problems, wouldn’t he spend more time on them?

I compare this moment to the introduction of a vaccine, where a bit of the virus (politics) is allowed into the bloodstream (the field of vision of the American bourgeois) so that it can immediately be eradicated by the immune system (the reterritorializing power of the comforting American progress-through-charity ideology).

Keeping readers in a constant state of becoming aware creates an indefinite loop that would be laughable if it were not so productive. And while it produces awareness of abused bodies over there, it resolutely refuses to make readers aware of their complicity in those abuses. The material conditions that reinforce the world’s structural violences apparently do not qualify as awareness-worthy.

This is the quintessential distillation of the parallax: looking without looking, knowing what not to know. And because we cannot figure this out on our own, we learn when and why to close our eyes from those who are experts at opening and closing them.

No, the danger is that a real groundswell of short-term pressure will result in further funding and political support to armies with despicable human rights records, armies which will use their new power not to “end a war”, but to consolidate the militarisation of social struggles in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, to further victimise “their own” populations, to ratchet up the exploitation of collective wealth for private and state gain, and to open the door yet wider for AFRICOM and others, all processes which reproduce and entrench the social forces #Kony2012 fanboys and fangirls think they’re getting away from.

Whatever happens with Kony, this is congealing into a distinct and clumsy post-Iraq pattern: activist networks, dependent on flimsy and superficial friend/enemy constructions, seeking to put state and private military power to work. Save Darfur re-iterated; the development-security nexus socially-networked; the armed wing of faux-civil society.

And yet the petulant requirement for some alternative from critics (what would you do, then?) matters. As usually put, the charge is hollow. Clarifying context and arguing against counter-productive policy is also ethical action, and so, by the way, is research and writing (however bad academics are at popularising their products). Moreover, the demand for action is not the same as action, still less effectivepolitical action, and no one should be detained overlong by childish injunctions that something must be done, with no thought as to the what, the how or the why.

Our problem is this: it is not at all clear that a serious and politically sound version of #Kony2012 could succeed,

So the critics are right, and the ingenues wrong. But the shallowness with which #Kony2012 has been received too easily tempts us into dismissal. There is no question that academics and analysts could do better in making more complex public understandings possible. Part of the reason for their failure to do so, but only part, is the widespread view that citizen-publics will react negatively to anything that challenges a one-dimensional worldview, as the #Kony2012 counter-backlash seems to bear out. This danger is more contingent than we think, and there is real scope for re-thinking the public universityand its forms. Ephemeral as it may turn out to be, #Kony2012 should at least jolt us into some thought, and some action, aimed at reconfiguring our own narratives of good guys and bad.